Smoking is injurious to health.

She holds the cigarette between her tentative fingers. The pungent smell of burning tobacco overpowers her nostrils and she holds her breath. She must get used to this. Damn it, she must like it. Crave for it, even. Her lips close in on the cigarettes as she tries to balance it in her mouth. With a flick of the lighter, she sucks in all the air her lungs will hold. The flame sets her cigarette alight and now, just now, the cigarette feels comforting. Slightly wet, it illuminates the dark room with sporadic bursts of dotted amber lights when she releases her breath. She can hear sharp protests emanating from the uneven brown flakes as they crackle and pop, stuffed inside the thin white paper. With each noise, a thin wisp of smoke reaches upwards like tendrils. Combining with the other strands of smoke, they dance seductively around her. For a moment she is lost in identifying the shapes of the smoke as the breeze twists it, contorts it and plays with it- moulding it in its bizarre wily impulses.

The others, they look at her with an expression that is curious and yet disinterested. They ask for her to grow up. They ask for too much.

The rancid tobacco haze progresses with impunity in her mouth. It inspects every nook and corner, leaving behind a sticky smell that clings to her pores, forcing them to open and absorb every detail of its peculiar aftertaste- it’s hoarse somehow, a little bitter. Its complex, she can tell. There are layers in it, hidden and conspiring, which reveal themselves only after successive drags. She tastes a virgin nymph- blue eyed innocence with a streak of cruelty. She tastes sarcasm- wry words laced with desperation. She tastes nostalgia- sepia memories fast fading into oblivion. Her tongue, shocked at the onslaught, keeps very still, taking it all in.

Slowly the tobacco haze seeps into her veins, running through her limbs, paralyzing her senses, incapacitating her thoughts, dousing her being. She is suddenly limitless, suddenly weightless and suddenly transparent. All that which existed before, the struggle, the pain, the sheer humiliation- it ceases and the future evaporates. Nothing matters, anymore.

Posted By

Swati.

Saving the world one copy at a time.